Happy Valentine’s Day! With everything that’s going on in the world, a day of love is perhaps sorely needed.
Many of you probably already received the information about the phishing attack posed to Athabasca University student, where an official looking email is sent with a note that there is an outstanding tuition fee payment. This, of course, is false, and cursory examination will show this through things like the account you’re supposed to send to being one for Algoma University, not Athabasca, or the payment address being to one “@athabascauniversity.store” instead of the usual “@athabascau.ca” or even “athabasca.edu”
However, just because that phishing attempt was done by idiots doesn’t mean they all will be. So as a general public service announcement, whenever you get any email dealing with money, whether sending or receiving, double check that all the addresses make sense. Otherwise, you may have found an additional step to “Avoid Saving Money” as this week’s tongue-in-cheek article by Blythe Appleby presents.
But this week, I chose to feature The Fly on the Wall, as Jason Sullivan looks at reporting from a slate article talking about how general socialization in online video-games has gone largely quiet. There was a time, not that many years ago, when I remember being able to sit in the lobby of a particular video-game just chatting with other people while we all waited for particular events to happen or certain favored players to join so that we could play with them. Apparantly this does not happen as often, and, honestly, I’m not surprised. The Fly on the Wall explores some possible reasons for that, reasons that one might conclude indicate things are getting worse, socially, but I think I might just counter that noting that Discord and other such apps have made chatting during videogames something that does not need to be constrained to the game itself. And these days, people can be involved in multiple conversations simultaneously, with windows coming to the fore as comments are made, all while playing a video-game. If anything, this says more, to me, about the quality of the games we’re being provided. Graphical fidelity has certainly improved, but the gameplay mechanics of so many of these games seem to be rehashes of everything else as companies seek the most efficient ways to pull money from players.
Also this week, Alek presents us with his summary of the Hogue report resulting from the Foreign Interference Commission. Or more specifically, his summary of the criticisms against it, while cautioning us to remember that there is a second, classified report that is going to the lawmakers specifically.
Meanwhile, back in Alberta, things are continuing to heat up with the suit against the government now being filed for wrongful dismissal of the Alberta Health Services CEO, with Danielle Smith saying she knew nothing about the entire thing before media reports were published, although she also says the government has been asking for eight months for proof of wrong-doing, and for some reason fired the CEO and the entire AHS Board, even though it was her government that appointed them. But hey, she says she was clueless about the whole thing. In this case, I’ll not only give her the benefit of the doubt on that, but I’ll go so far as to say we shouldn’t assume she has a clue about anything going on in the Alberta government.
But what else is new. Enjoy the read!
